U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, D-Mich. speaks during a news conference Wednesday July 28, 2010 by the Kalamazoo River off Jackson Street in Battle Creek, Mich. Schauer said Enbridge was slow in alerting federal authorities of an oil spill that dumped more than 800,000 gallons of oil into a southern Michigan river. (AP Photo/The Battle Creek Enquirer, John Grap) MANDATORY CREDIT / AP

More

ADVERTISEMENT

The Rick Snyder who gave his third State of the State address last week is not the same man who spoke in that chamber two years ago.

The governor who promised to bring us together to reinvent Michigan is gone. In his place, we see a governor who has embraced the divisive and counterproductive policies he once decried.

You might call it the reinvention of Rick Snyder.

The candidate who campaigned in 2010 as an admirer of the moderate and pragmatic Bill Milliken is now enacting the ideological policies Dick DeVos would have put in place had the voters not soundly rejected him at the polls in 2006.

As his annual address revealed, he accepts no responsibility for the bitter feelings that resulted from his actions — Snyder’s conveniently timed pivot on this contentious issue, his decision to rush the bill into law in a lame-duck session relying on the votes of defeated lawmakers, and the use of a parliamentary maneuver to deny the public its right to a referendum vote.

If Snyder isn’t responsible for those decisions, then who is running our state?

As a businessman, the governor may think that this controversy will simply fade away now that he has rolled out next year’s product.

What the governor fails to understand, however, is that once an elected official breaks the bond of trust with the public, no amount of feel-good rhetoric can repair that rupture.

If Snyder does not yet understand the magnitude of the damage he has done to his own credibility, he might want to consider the words of the man he chose to lead the Michigan Economic Development Corp., Michael Finney.

Earlier this month, Finney told members of the Economic Club of Detroit that the MEDC had only recently examined the potential impact of right to work because the governor had said it was not on his agenda. Finney went on to say that even after the MEDC did a deep dive into the issue, it could not predict the impact right-to-work policies would have on Michigan’s economy.

It appears our data-driven governor switched his stance on right to work without the benefit of number crunching by his own economic development experts. It appears the only calculations the self-proclaimed nerd made were political.

Finney isn’t the only one who believed Snyder when he said right to work was not on his agenda. Hundreds of thousands of Michigan voters concluded that Proposal 2, which would have codified collective bargaining in the state constitution, was unnecessary after repeated assurances from the governor that right to work was “not on his agenda.”

Unfortunately for the governor, that sense of betrayal is not limited to the issue of right to work.
Proponents of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Michiganders can’t understand why the governor signed legislation that prohibits public sector employment benefits for same-sex partners. Supporters of a woman’s right to choose and access to women’s health care were appalled when the governor signed a bill that will harass and, in some cases, shut down women’s health clinics in our state and will make access to mammograms and cancer screenings more difficult.

When tax day arrives in April, Michigan’s working families and retirees will be shocked by how much their tax bills have gone up. And those who know that the real key to Michigan’s future is education are outraged that $1 billion was raided from our public schools to pay for Snyder’s business tax cuts.

Many Michigan citizens have not only been angered by the governor’s lurch to the right, they have been saddened by the unnecessary polarization of our state. What makes this turn of events tragic is that it did not have to be this way.

When a new governor takes on the challenge of leading Michigan in tough times, the overwhelming majority of us — Republicans, independents and Democrats — want him or her to succeed because we want Michigan to succeed.

But when a governor squanders that goodwill by using deceptive, heavy-handed tactics to pursue a narrow special-interest agenda, it becomes impossible to develop the bipartisan consensus we need to resolve our most stubborn problems.

Mark Schauer served in the Michigan House in 1997 to 2002, in the state Senate in 2003-08, as the Michigan Senate’s Democratic leader in 2007-08, and in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Michigan’s 7th District in 2009-10.